Tom had not the least suspicion as to whom he was befriending until then, and now, unmindful of his own aching foot, he assisted George to the seat he had vacated, and watched the party without a pang as they drove rapidly away, leaving him alone with Isaac. “We’ll do the best we can, my boy,” he said, cheerily, as he met the confiding, inquiring look bent upon him by Isaac, who, relieved of his former charge, felt now like leaning for protection and guidance upon Captain Carleton. Alas, his hopes were short-lived, for a groan just then escaped from Tom’s white lips, wrung out by the agony it cost him to step. Isaac saw him stagger when he sprang to the ground, and comprehending the case at once, he resumed his burden of care, and kneeling before poor Tom, who had sunk upon the grass, he rubbed the swollen limb as tenderly as Rose herself could have done. “If we could only find some water,” Tom said, scanning the appearance of the woods, and judging at last by indications which seldom failed, that there must be some not very far away. “There where the bushes are,” he said, pointing toward the very spot where Bill lay snoring soundly, and dreaming of robbing Parson Goodwin’s orchard, in company with Hal. “There must be water there, and human beings too, for I hear singing, don’t you?” Isaac listened till he, too, caught a strain of melody, as sad and low as if it were a funeral dirge some one was trilling there. “What can it mean?” Tom said. “Lend me your hand, my boy, and I’ll soon find out.” It was a harder task to move than he anticipated, for the ankle was swelling rapidly, and bearing the least weight upon it made the pain intolerable. Leaning on Isaac’s shoulder, he managed to make slow progress toward the stream bubbling so deliciously among the grass, and toward the music growing more and more distinct. It was reached at last, and the mystery was solved. Leaning against a tree was a Confederate officer, whose white face told plainer than words could tell that never again would he be seen in the pine-shadowed home he had left so unwillingly but a few months before. Beside him upon the grass lay a boy, scarcely more than twelve years old, a drummer in a company of New England volunteers, both little hands shot entirely off, and the bleeding stumps bound carefully up in the handkerchief of the Rebel, who had smothered his own dying anguish for the sake of comforting that poor child, sobbing so piteously with pain. “I didn’t s’pose any of you was so good, or I shouldn’t have come to fight you. Oh, mother, mother, they do ache so,—my hands,—my hands!” he said, the cry of contrition ending in a childish wail for the mother sympathy never more to be experienced by that drummer boy.